Trump's TV Audience: 32M

President Trump's State of the Union address on Tuesday night drew an estimated 32.6 million television viewers, Nielsen Media Research reported Thursday. The total marked a drop from the 36 million who watched his first address to Congress of his second term last year, the Hill reports, but slightly exceeded the audience for Joe Biden's final joint-session speech the year before. That address attracted about 32.2 million viewers. Trump's highest-rated such appearance remains his first State of the Union in 2017, which topped 47 million viewers, though even that trailed Barack Obama's 2009 address, which was watched by about 52 million people.

The new figures cover only traditional TV viewing and do not include livestreams, social media clips, or delayed online viewing. As with most TV programming, State of the Union audiences have fallen in recent years as viewers turn to social media and streaming channels for big events, Axios points out. Fox News led all networks in viewership of the nearly two-hour speech, with over 9 million people on average watching between 9:15pm and 11pm ET. MS Now was next with 2.4 million viewers, then CNN with 2.2 million. Of the broadcast networks, ABC led with an audience of 5.1 million. NBC had 3.6 million viewers and CBS 3.3 million.